The Hidden Years Sarah Law

You had been banished, yet you neverleft your Norfolk home;

sometimes they would hear things –a peasant girl pausing

at the dawn's lip, Aves fluting through a haze of faith;

the old priest in his tattered robe would sometimes glimpse the curve

of your gauzy form, your oval eyes, your smile, in an uncertain light.

Rustling trees. The starling's flight. Sometimes a stream of gold

like a layer of sun-kissed hair rivering over this blue-green world.

(Over four hundred years passed between the destruction of the Marian shrine at Walsingham and its restoration in the early twentieth century.)